TV Home - Automated recordings of BBC idents

What does the term P/F changes mean?

The DVB standard includes P/F = Present/Following event information - data telling you the name and contents of the show presently broadcasting and the one that will follow. This is used to display "Now and Next" information on receivers. This is separate to the EPG data (Freesat and Sky use proprietary EPGs but DVB standard P/F)

I think the full name of the data is "EIT p/f actual"

Thanks.

That’s a good shout. And yep, it’s all dependent on the signal. If it’s the ident then perfect but even if it’s the start of the programme that’s not too bad as I’ll rewind 30secs. Just as long as it’s consistent either way.

When I briefly plugged in another tuner to test recording channels on another mux, the HDD lost power! The old Pi is still up and running so I’ll try it on that before investing in a powered hub (which I guess is what I need).

I’ve still no idea why BBC Four is so wildly out compared to the other channels though.

Asa - is that BBC Four SD or HD? BBC Four HD on Freeview isn't coded and muxed by the BBC - so there may be an additional delay introduced by Arqiva? (I'd assumed the EIT p/f was delayed to match this encoder delay, but maybe it isn't?)

If it's BBC Four SD - no idea why!

Yep, it's SD! It's very strange considering One/Two is typically spot on. Four is now consistently out - sometimes triggered during the credits of the previous programme. As they're on the same mux, I'd have thought they'd either all be right or all be wrong.

As I'm not convinced the signal strength would hold up very well by splitting it, I've instead swapped the stick out for a Hauppauge WinTV-dualHD one which is letting me record a second mux. (This did involve the fun of getting out a powered hub and updating the kernel to get the second tuner to work!)

I'm tempted to see if the flag is any more reliable on BBC Four HD. Currently it's being used to trial ITV HD which seems fairly reliable. It's generally on the end of the final trailer just before the ident, which is great. Occasionally a few seconds into the ident or ~15secs before the ident so I may have to upload a bit longer to cover it. Sometimes I do manually adjust the timings and reprocess, but it somewhat defeats the object of automated recordings.

You should only need one DVB-T2 tuner for PSB3 (which will get you BBC One HD, BBC Two HD, CBBC HD, ITV HD, C4 HD and C5 HD at the same time), leaving you a second DVB-T2 tuner for the mux with BBC Four HD/CBeebies HD?

BBC Two entries are duplicated today.

Good point, I've currently split it One/Four SD and Two/ITV HD but will shift it around at some point. If that fails then I may just have to stop recording BBC Four.



Oops. There's a job that runs every morning to manually add recordings that it hadn't automatically added (e.g MOTD on a Sunday morning because it knew it recorded it Saturday night) but when I switched to HD yesterday it thought all of BBC Two (SD)'s programmes needed recording! Should be ok now.

Good to see ITV idents added to the mix - just in time for all the fun on Tuesday. Though the front page header needs an update now: "Automated recording of BBC idents".

Yep, ITV is now up and running. Because of the variance on when the flag occurs, I went for a different tact and as almost all idents fade to black I'm doing some black detection and then work backwards. It's not 100% but generally seems to work.

I wonder if the fade is for any particular reason? Do STV need it for a clean start to the programme? Weirdly I've seen that some late night shows - Jackpot and Nightscreen just do a straight cut. And the 9.25 crossover always has a period of black before the ident, which feels like an unnecessary anachronism (especially given we've once seen GMB do a split screen to ITN).

There is a period of black at the other end as well, 6am. Presumably it's for "content separation". Looking at YouTube not all stations came over on black at 9:25am (indeed there is one from Anglia which seems to suggest they were up and running before the switch occurred).